A medical facility typically requires physician input to determine the most appropriate medical care for the patient. However, requiring a physician to be present 24 hours a day at the medical facility to examine the patient, or a radiological image of the patient, may be inefficient and expensive. Particularly, a medical facility may not have the financial resources or patient volume to support a physician on site at all times; the medical facility may be located in a remote location; or a town may not have a sufficient number of physicians available to be located at each medical facility at all times of the day. As such, when a patient requires medical attention, an experienced physician may not be readily available at a particular medical facility.
Accordingly, a system is needed which acquires an image of a patient and transmits the image to a remote location for viewing and analysis by an experienced physician. While prior art teleradiology systems exist which establish a direct communication link to a remote location and transmit radiological images to the remote location, these systems often require dedicated hardware and software at the medical facility and at the, remote viewing location wherein the hardware and software is complicated and expensive. Due to increasing budget constraints, medical facilities and physicians typically cannot allocate the substantial funds required to purchase the dedicated teleradiology systems. Moreover, existing teleradiology systems do not provide secure, password-protected transmission of data from numerous medical facilities to a centralized repository for remote viewing by physicians from their existing personal computers.
With the rapid expansion of the Internet and other computer-based technologies, a personal computer already exists at a physician's home or office. Physicians are also becoming increasingly knowledgeable of computer technology, the use of a personal computer, and the use of information on the Internet. While the Internet allows the transmission of electronic mail with image attachments, the use of electronic mail is typically not secure and requires the entry of various Internet addresses in order to send an image to multiple locations. Moreover, many individual medical facilities have their own computer systems which can be accessed, via a user identification and password, by physicians associated with the medical facility. However, physicians are typically associated with a few medical facilities, thereby often requiring a physician to obtain, and keep track of, different user identifications and passwords to access each medical facility computer. Thus, a system is needed which allows physicians to use a single user identification and password for viewing patient images from a home or office, in a secure manner, over the Internet.